The biggest failing in my generation is the inconstancy of our affections, driven by an inconsistent mix of ironic detachment and fear of being uncool.
Think of poor hair bands like RATT, on tour in 1991. In the exact same weeks as Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" starts its relentless climb up the charts RATT suddenly finds themselves playing to stadiums that are not even half full. Gen Xers' affections are so inconstant that poor RATT went from the Beatles to Spinal Tap in two weeks.
And then when grunge did get over almost everybody was too scared to really be fans. What if these Nirvana guys end up like RATT?* Far better to mark an arbitrary point where the band "sold out" and claim to only like stuff before that (for Nirana fans Bleach and the material later released on Incesticide, for Soundgarden fans everything before Superunknown, for Nine Inch Nails fans everything before Downward Spiral, for REM fans everything before Warner Brothers debut Green, etc. etc. etc.).
Punk was in part supposed to be about freeing oneself from the hegemony of cool. Grunge was supposed to be a return to this, but it wrecked itself on the shores of a generation embodied by the content-free irony that characterized the television show Seinfeld (laugh track and all) at its best. Irony becomes not the appropriate response to certain aspects of life, but rather a detached way of engaging with everything.
As grunge itself shipwrecked for various reasons it got swept away by the tides of a music that openly celebrated frat boy ressentiment at its worst (Limp Biscuit, etc.).*** The White Stripes era was a sort of last ditch effort to hold the line before Clear Channel, MTV, political paralysis and other harbingers of civilizational hopelessness made it completely unimportant what kind of "music" is popular. Today almost all of it is melody-free aural wallpaper, leavened with Miley Cyrus type pseudo-outrage and minstrel show regurgitations of past moments when record company profits actually sometimes exerted selective pressure in favor of music with actual melodies (pity the poor unemployed "A&R man," whose services in general are no longer needed).
Now one of the things that interests me is that how the internet rose just as grunge was failing as a popular aesthetic moment. And while there are many compelling sociological explanations of why people are so much more rude and uncharitable on the internet than they are face to face (Q&A after philosophy presentations notwithstanding), I think part of the explanation is that Seinfeldian irony just went through grunge types and onto the interwebs to metastasize.
What Graham Harman calls the internet "sneer from nowhere" just is the hipster who can't really be a fan of anything because of the crippling fear of being uncool. In philosophy debates this leads to a kind of hyper-critical engagement where everyone trying to say something substantive has to satisfy Cartesian level demands for justification, but the critic doesn't because the critic has figured out how to be too cool to get into any such entanglements. Thus is born, in Ray Brassier's words, "an orgy of on-line stupidity," though the double standard faced by the critical and post-critical philosopher surely effects proper publication as well.
Luckily, in the musical realm, you still get just enough non-hipsters who are aspie-like in their devotions. Like Philip Larkin's bicyclist walking through the empty church, something is thus kept alive. For example, I had a female student last year who could go on and on about every aspect of The Runaways. For an hour in my office one day she shared her theories about just exactly how Joan Jett was influenced by Suzie Quatro. There was no ironic detachment at all, just this passion for the oevre. It gave me hope.
If one wanted to be unfair, one would say that (for better and worse) analytic philosophers have perfected the sneer from nowhere and continental philosophers have perfected the art of being a fan. While there is something to this, there are obviously important counterexamples, and for that matter maybe Carl Sachs is right and there will soon be enough overlap to render the point moot.**** I don't know, but like Larkin's meditations on what happens to churchs once we give up superstition, I sometimes wonder what would happen to philosophy if (for example) some particularly virulant on-going permutation of positivism/phenomenology wins, and nobody is willing to potentially embarass themselves by offering up substantive truths about the world.***** Luckily, we are nowhere near the Larkin tipping point, and I can't help but hope that the uncool millenials will do better than my generation both with respect to music and philosophy.******
[Notes:
*They did. RATT rhythm guitarist Robin Crosby died of a heroin overdose on June 6, 2002. I often look for actuarial research on what jobs are the most dangerous. Unfortunately none of the surveys include "member of a rock band" as a category, but I think it's probably as bad or worse than the usual suspects (lumberjack, commercial fisherman, and roustabout). Part of why this is so depressing is that rock music mortality seems to go up the more successful the musician is. I don't think that anything like this holds for lumberjacks.**
**Who as we all know, work all night and sleep all day.
***A dear friend of mine knew it was all over when he had gone to a fraternity party for the free booze in college. In their back yard the frat boys had an elaborate set up of beer bottles that all together quoted the Maoist rap rock outfit Rage Against the Machine's lyric "Fuck you, I won't do what you told me," because apparently "the man" is keeping us down whenever he investigates our chapter for the latest round of hazing, academic dishonesty, and/or date rape. The Rage Against the Machine album played for the entire hour that my friend allocated to cleaning out the liquor cabinet. He never once said, "Dude. You are the machine." It was too hopeless, and the rise of the Fred Durst era proved him right.
Incidentally, Kurt Cobain once said something to the effect that his best friend at concerts were the spotlights because they prevented him from seeing all of the people in the audience who would have beaten him up in high school. And I once had a diabetic friend who danced in a strip club to pay for her medications. Like Cobain, this was only possible for her because she had contact lenses she could take out before going on stage.
****I'm 2/3ds sympathetic to this. The danger is that we end up saying that because we have California Heideggerians now the people involved with SPEP should just shut up and get back to work.
*****Am just finishing a paper with Neal Hebert on levels of aesthetic distance in professional wrestling. There are actually strong homologies between different types of wrestling fandom and the following: naive realist, skeptic, post-skeptic metaphysician, positivist/phenomenologist, post-modern metaphysician. We're probably going to leave this out of the paper, so I'll do a post in the next week or so. It's much more interesting than the above early morning meditations.
******Please read Jennifer Egan's beautiful novel A Visit from the Goon Squad for some evidence of how this might be happening. I think there is a little bit of techno-fetishism at the end with how crowd-sourcing will replace the traditional A&R thing, but the concert itself and the little boy obsessed with musical stops are beautifully rendered and get something right about those among us who might unironically assert "Rock is dead. Long live rock." Was it Richard Rorty who said that philosophy buries its own undertakers?]
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